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Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, June 13 2013 @ 03:31 PM EDT |
To prove how *little* he searched for stuff relating to bank robbery.
Maybe skype conversations as well, this would provide evidence he didn't avoid
phone records by using skype.
How about records of when he updated windows... just in case he manually updated
at the same time as the bank robbery providing him an alibi.
And so on...[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Authored by: IANALitj on Thursday, June 13 2013 @ 08:33 PM EDT |
This would seem to be the tip of a huge iceberg.
The defendant's counsel in an ongoing murder trial has asked for what he says
would be exculpatory metadata from his cell phone calls. The Department of
Justice has previously denied that it has the data and has also denied being
able to get the data from the telephone company.
Now there has been a new request, based on the sudden disclosure that the NSA (a
different part of the United States government than the Department of Justice,
but still a part of it) does have huge amounts of metadata, plausibly including
the potentially exculpatory metadata. The judge has asked for a response from
the government, suggesting that it provide an affidavit from the Attorney
General of the United States. He may be able honestly to disclaim personal
knowledge of the availability of the metadata, but such a dislaimer probably
would not satisfy the judge. (The technical legal term that would be relevant
is that such a disclaimer would be a negative pregnant.)
I can foresee many thousands of requests for exculpatory data that may be in the
hands of the NSA. In this first instance, the trial has been under way since
May, and the judge has asked the government for a very quick response -- two
days later -- so as to permit the materials to be used by in the defense of the
defendant. If there are as many such requests at the pretrial stage of other
cases as I expect, I would expect a lot of those trials to be delayed. That
would raise further "speedy trial" issues.
I foresee a lot of hiring by the Department of Justice and the NSA to deal with
the blizzard of paperwork that will form above this iceberg.
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Authored by: MDT on Thursday, June 13 2013 @ 11:20 PM EDT |
When I read all this, my first thought was imagine all the
messy divorce cases where attorney's are going to be
requesting the metadata of the other spouse?
Or murderers claiming they were somewhere else, and that
since the prosecution won't turn over the metadata that the
government has, they have to be let go (even if it's not
true they were somewhere else, it could be problematic to
disprove unless the government shows they weren't, since
they have the data).
Plus there's all the FOIA requests by people who want to
know what the government has on them now that it's in the
open.
This is honestly a bazillion edged sword for the government.
Not to mention how our allies overseas are reacting.
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MDT[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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